Cool Moves

Thinking back a little more about that last session, there were a couple of awesome things that happened:

• Dakkon grabbed a wolf by its tail and swung it at two adjacent guys, killing one.
• Emlyn jumped down from the castle wall and stabbed two guys at once, Ezio style.
• Borris (Master Hardworm!) kept a horse rider from taking off with Lucius by marking him and shutting down his movement.
• The school was named The Chargin' Charlie Memorial School for the Defense against the Dark Arts. Good name.
• Aderes rolled three (!) criticals in one burst attack. Insane! Most in the burst died from the horrifying illusion and the others were pretty messed up.
• Awendella fey stepped right into the thick of the battle and crippled the big strong enemy paladin with some crazy metal to glass power.
• Darkguard intimidated about 20 guys into running for their lives.

I think their students are probably thoroughly convinced of their teachers' awesomeness now, to say the least.

Heavy Handed DM = BAD

So, after a three month hiatus, my regular DnD group got back together. I think the break was good for me to relax a bit about needing to play. Now I'm in more of a wanting to play mindframe, and it feels much better. Anywho, what did I set up for the first session after a long break? A BATTLE. It had:

1. Heroscape terrain! (everybody loves Heroscape)
2. Lot of puny minions for the heroes to crush! (smashing bad guys is fun)
3. A tough jerk or two for the Strikers to strike! (but it's nice to do more than 1 damage)
4. Non-standard victory conditions! (hmmm...it seemed like a good idea)

It didn't go so well. In fact, it pretty much sucked from my point of view.

The setup was that the party had opened up a small school for rich kids to be trained by our now famous (locally at least) heroes. One day, a heavily armored man marches out from the surrounding woods and declares that the party must give him Lucius (one of the kids) or die. I thought the party would laugh at the loser and fight, but be eventually overwhelmed by the never ending stream of minions I sent their way. Then I hoped they would hole up in the outpost and eventually try to escape, setting up my plans for the next encounter. It all seemed so simple in my head, and I thought it would be real fun to play.

In reality, the never ending stream of minions did NOT bother them, and they rushed out to destroy the enemies they quite correctly perceived as leaders, hoping to end the stream of baddies. At this point I should have let this happen. I should have rolled with it and let them win, and modified my future plans in between encounters. Heck, now that I think of it, that would have been super fun! Man. Anyway, what I did do was throw more minions at them. LOTS more minions. I figured I could scare them back in that way. Nope. I did make them all start playing with their cell phones though. Guess it sucks to wait for me to move 40 freakin guys (note to self, this sucks for me too). Anyway, awesome slayers that they are, they nova'd my boss with dailies and encounters and then Jesse and Katrina pulled off a combo ghost sound/intimidate move that sent a large majority of the army running. Did I give up and let them go the way they were heading then? No, of course not!

No no no, I had to have my stupid way. Now I had some cavalry dudes ride in and try to carry off the kid so the heroes would have to give chase. Bleh. At this point it got kind of cool as the party rallied to protect the kid and Carolyn took advantage of the opportunity to give up a standard action to control all 5 kids. After I had the Lucius lead the kids off on horseback so the villians (and perhaps the heroes, if they decide they care) can chase after them next time.

In retrospect, the encounter plays out as a really cool story, but it just wasn't that fun to actually play. From now on I'll stick to fewer baddies for sure, and I will definitely pay more attention to where the players are taking the game. Because THAT is the fun! Seeing what happens! Not making everyone do what I want.

D&D Heroscape and Heroscape D&D

D&D Heroscape
I finally played a game of D&D Heroscape, and was trounced. I played the first scenario which seemed very simple: defeat the Troll and save your teammate from his sinking cage. Unfortunately, I misplayed my healer and my wife used her brutish troll to great effect. Man. I guess I'm not very good when I don't have all the cards memorized. On the other hand, maybe she'll be more likely to play it again later.

Heroscape with D&D

I also played in another game of 4E D&D! An ad-hoc delve built with Heroscape tiles by Jesse, and it was pretty awesome. It really gets a lot more fun as a player when you get more comfortable and familiar with your powers. When I don't have to read my character sheet all the time, I can think more about what would be fun or cool to do instead of what the sheet says. Also, I had a lot of fun talking in character. The high point for me was definitely the introduction to a helpful centaur named Chargin' Charlie. He helped us fight some gnolls, ran off and called Snaggletooth a hag, and was later obliterated by Snaggle Cracking the Sky and blasting him off a 30 foot high bridge. RIP Chargin' Charlie.

Descent, of course!

Last but not least was a solo game of Descent using the Descent Quest rules. I picked two heroes and stumbled my way through a game that took about 3 hours. I'm still pretty new to the vanilla Descent rules, so rule lookups and a general unfamiliarity with the player side of things certainly slowed me down. Regardless, I really enjoyed the decisions Descent combat gave me, and the flow of the game cracked me up with its similarity to old school Warhammer Quest. Lots of surprise attacks from big scary monsters and pit traps right when you think you're going to get a treasure. All the game needs is the chance to drop your lantern and die in a panicked sprint for the dungeon entrance. I might have to add that. Anyway, I'm excited to try it co-op with some friends now that I'm more familiar with the rules.

Descent and DnD - Also, I love resource management!

The last two weekends were fun; I got to play D&D and Descent the weekend before last, and played Descent again this past weekend.

For DnD we finished up one delve and started another. I'm thoroughly enjoying my Gnoll Cleric "Snaggletooth". I didn't settle on a name before I started playing her, but everyone else settled on Snaggletooth pretty quickly. Maybe her real name will come out later, maybe not.

Our party of 4 (Wild Sorceror, Battle Cleric, Paladin, and Rogue) has been doing pretty well on delves a level or two above our own. Maybe the DM is going easy on us, but I think it also might have something to do with the fact that guaranteed 3-encounter dungeons make resource management easier. If we make it to the final encounter of the delve without using our daily, the only question left is "how soon?", not "should I?".

For Descent, I played the overlord both times, and it was fun. Definitely different from being a DM, but that was good. I liked being adversarial for a bit instead of cooperative. The first game seemed a little easy for the heroes, but I realized afterwards I had neglected to collect threat when monsters rolled surges on attacks on the heroes. That little difference might have puched me closer to winning, since I rarely had enough threat to play any traps until the very end of the game. Even though I was doing it wrong, though, it was a neat way to regulate my damage dealing potential.

The second game did not go so well for the heroes. In fact, they lost in the first room of the dungeon, blasted by sorcerors and torn to pieces by beastmen. It didn't feel very satisfying to "win" as the Overlord. I kind of wish I had pulled some punches so we could have continued through the rest of the dungeon...oh well. We did get to play some tiddlywinks...I mean X-bugs...I mean Micro Mutants: Evolution. Also, I got this awesome picture:

Wife is not happy. Pictures = evidence of her nerd gaming.

I really enjoy the tension caused in 4E DnD and Descent by the decisions you have to make regarding your actions and resources. You can only do so much in a turn, but there are 15 monsters coming after you! You can do cool stuff if you spend a daily/encounter/action point/fatigue but then what do you do if something even bigger comes around the corner? I love being provided with those tactical (and sometimes even strategic) decisions.

Long D&D break, hopefully over soon

No dnd for a long time now. After finishing up Thunderspire we've all just played my other board games when we get together, which is fine. They don't get enough play otherwise. To make matters worse (better!) I got a bunch of awesome games for Christmas. Cave Troll, Drakon, Micro Mutants Advanced, Beowulf: The Legend, Doom: The Boardgame, and Descent: Journeys in the Dark. Beowulf, Doom, and Descent are magnificent time suckers, so they'll probably eat up a good amount of otherwise fine dnd time. The other three look to be great shorter games, for different kinds of nights. Anyway, I've got time. And I am super excited to put some in to these games. Maybe I'll put play reports here. A good session report (with pictures) is always fun to read.

My newly acquired copy of Descent. Thanks Mom and Dad!

Google Wave, and Magic/D&D

I'm super stoked about the Google Wave invite I won from Asmor on his blog, Encounter-a-day. He ran a contest where you had to convert Magic: the Gathering monsters into 4E D&D monsters. It was pretty fun, and I got to use some old favorites and a new one from 2010. I think Asmor'll be posting them on his blog sometime soon.

Anyway, I've read a bunch of stories about the possibilities (and realities) of playing RPGs by Wave and I'd like to see if I can get in on one. I've hardly had the time to even look around yet, but maybe tonight I'll try to see if I can get a hold of someone running a game.

I even saw couple of my contacts already had invites, so that's cool. I'm not sure what it takes (just time?) to get invites, but I'd really like to get some long distance friends together to try some wave games.

In case you don't know what Google Wave is, check this out:


Or you can watch their insanely long (1:20 mins)preview video here.

Wow. I want a trampoline wall. (saw this on neatorama)